Home > Local marathoner ‘very fortunate’; was leaving site at time of bombing

Steve Clark - Thursday, April 25, 2013 7:45 AM

Justin Glancy, of Huntington, may have competed in the Boston Marathon on April 15, but he found out about the terror attack like everyone else.

"I was very fortunate," he says.

"I had a scheduled flight leaving Boston at 4:30 p.m. I was finished with the race right around what would've been 1 p.m. As I finished I kept moving through the stations and got my luggage and headed on the metro out to the airport and while I was going through security - I remember because you can look down and you can see the road area - I remember seeing ambulances start going by and I thought that, you know, later on in the race people might be having some difficulties finishing. I didn't think anything of it.

"As I went through security to get to my gate, I looked at my phone ... and had about five or six missed calls and probably 10 or 12 text messages."

Glancy says many of the missed calls were from his sister and that she was the first person he called back. Prior to that call, Glancy says he was "oblivious to what had happened until I heard word from my sister first and as I turned around to go look at the TV monitors and the replay that everyone has seen over and over again of the bombs going off.

"That was the first time I heard about it."

The bombs, which were pressure cookers packed with shrapnel, killed three people and injured 183 others. Authorities identified two suspects in the attack, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; the former was killed in a firefight with authorities on April 19 in Watertown, MA, and the latter was apprehended by police later that evening.

"When I first saw I did not even realize how tragic it was until a little bit later on," Glancy says. "And that's when it kind of hit me that an hour before I was right in that spot."

Glancy notes he's lucky that the birth of his sister's first child on Thursday, April 18, prevented any family members from accompanying him to Boston.

"That took precedence over, in my family, coming to see me," he says. "Which, they could've been close to the finish line as well."

Glancy's desire to compete in marathons remains unaffected by the attack.

"If anything, it's something that has made my will to do Boston again next spring something stronger," he says.

Glancy admits he was initially disappointed with his performance in the race, but that the attack put everything into perspective.

"I definitely wanted to run better than I did," he says, "but that's something else that I've talked about with family, that they kind of knew I was disappointed with my performance, but at the end of the day, when something like this happens, it just goes to show you that running 26 miles down a road doesn't mean a whole lot, but just being here and having that connection with family and friends, just not taking anything for granted in life, is so much more important than any type of achievement."